


The Tin Man

by littlerhymes



Category: Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Gen, Yuletide 2004
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-25
Updated: 2004-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:23:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlerhymes/pseuds/littlerhymes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ichabod Crane, with a bullet to the heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tin Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Truth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/gifts).



> Thanks to SQ for beta reading.
> 
> I'm not sure if the Truth on AO3 is the same Truth (dhaunea) I wrote the story for - if not, sorry for the mix-up! ETA: same person! :)

The remains of Ichabod Crane dreamed sometimes, of a world where the Lady Archer's bullet did not pierce his heart but was caught between the pages of a book of spells.

In this world he lived, and so did Katrina. He married her in a church draped in white and gold; and they danced all night in her father's manor to the scraping of fiddles before he brought her back to New York, riding in a coach-and-two with young Masbath beside them.

But that's dream. That's fantasy. Katrina's gone to dirt and dust, her grave once mounded with flowers though none are left to tend it now. Young Masbath ran away, to distant lands and the smoke of the lotus, forever trying to forget the Hollow.

As for Ichabod Crane: the bullet did not miss, not in this world, for the Lady shot true and shattered his heart to pieces. He died that day, though he was not permitted to rest. Ichabod Crane was not to be buried beside his Katrina, or alone in the earth of the western woods, nor even taken to the pyre and burnt to ashes.

The Lady took him before his body was cold. She bade the Hessian Horseman bring him to her house on the hill - _her_ house, now the Van Tassels were dead. Bump-bump, bump-bump, this the sound of Ichabod's dead heels kicking as Daredevil dragged him over the broken ground, a rope looped around his limp torso and the end of it held in the Horseman's gauntleted fist.

In the manor's deep cellar, until then a homely place smelling of dried apples and vinegar, the Lady Archer rolled up her sleeves; she sharpened her long knife; she prepared her bloody magicks. There were none to witness her secret rites but the Hessian at the door and the worms that squirmed in the clotted earthen floor; and the Devil, of course, down below.

Ichabod Crane woke to the Lady's chill hands caressing his face; his first sight her smiling lips the colour of berries and eyes dark as the millpond frozen over. He choked on a breath of air pulled sharp-stabbing into lungs that no longer needed it, and the Lady laughed as he gagged.

So Ichabod Crane rose from the dead, to be the second of her servants.

*

In those days, there was much that seemed strange, or wrong, but he had not yet the wit to comprehend these for his will then was as weak as the Lady's was terrible. She buttoned him into a snow white shirt and a coal black coat, the tip of her tapered finger lingering over the penny-sized hole in his chest. She put lies into his mouth with her own silver-plated tongue and then pushed him down the path to the Hollow to utter them.

There were none to tell the tale that he was dead, except young Masbath, and _he_ had already fled the Americas in favour of the sea. Dogs snarled at Ichabod Crane's passing and the birds took to the sky in horror; but the villagers had no name for the dread that prickled down their spines when his glassy-eyed gaze met their own.

These were honest God-fearing folk and no matter that Inspector Crane told them that their homes were safe when all knew that the Horseman's ghost still rode the night - why, anyone could see the row of fresh grave-mounds on the hillside, and for all his fine words even a fool could see that the Inspector was a changed man. A _cursed_ man, some whispered, and more silently believed.

Young Masbath was the first to abandon the Hollow, but he was far from the last.

Cloistered in the manor house, the Lady Archer took little note of the hamlet's abandonment. She had gained all she desired: that is, the deaths of her enemies and as bounty all that they left behind; and now her mind turned to grander schemes. With the Hessian as her sword-arm and Ichabod Crane her mouthpiece, she saw no reason why she need stop at the Hollow. Dreaming before the oak wood mirror, the Lady Archer saw herself riding into New York, a great beauty, a force to be reckoned with; she saw herself taking ship to London, Paris, and even beyond. She smoothed the dusty stripes of her cambric gown over her hips and imagined it the finest silk, humming to herself the broken phrases of her mother's only lullaby.

But it was Time which proved to be the Lady's greatest enemy. Urgency had departed, now that the Van Garretts and Van Tassels were dead, and in truth she was never to set foot outside the Hollow again.

Outside the seasons turned and turned, while the Lady dreamed and dreamed, till the stuff of her fancies hung heavy as smoke in the manor's darkened corridors. So dense were the snarls and streamers of her imagining, her madness, that they came to obscure even her own reflection. Her white hair matted into witch's knots, her hands twisted into skeletal claws, the mansion around her falling to damp, then decay, and finally ruin - none of these she saw. She veiled herself in cobwebs; she supped on bat's wings and wild mushroom; she read the stars.

The Lady Archer had planned, once, to raise more of the dead as her vassals (a dead girl to comb her hair, a dead man to wait at her table) but the headless Horseman and the heartless Crane remained her only servants. As she grew older and madder, she rarely had use even for them.

But who knows what shadows can say, what they might conspire in their silence? Whether they schemed, if they plotted and planned to rise up against the Lady Archer, to bury her screaming deep beneath the earth? In her paranoia and suspicion, she would call them up to remind them who was master, and thus the legends lived on for the descendents of those poorest few who had stayed in the Hollow when all others had fled.

Around the hearthside fires the villagers still told one another stories of the Horseman, riding the night with his deadly blade, of the blood-stained White Lady who haunted the abandoned house on the hill and the black-clad Gentleman who attended her. The children shivered and shrieked in delight, and the adults smiled - only half-believing.

Still, on the darkest nights of the year the folk of Sleepy Hollow would set pumpkins, and sausages, and cider on their doorsteps. The Lady's tithe, it was called, and both offered and accepted as what was rightfully due.

*

And then, at last, she died.

Through all the long years of his servitude, the remains of Ichabod Crane had felt the Lady as a constant presence checking all independent thought and deed. When her eye was elsewhere or her will indifferent, he had been little more than a discarded marionette, quiescent and awaiting her command, dreaming of futures that never were; but when that command came, he could no more have countered it then spun the earth backwards on its axis.

But everything was different now. Her spells unbound. He was as a dreamer, waking from the sleep of thirty years.

Ichabod Crane walked up the manor house's creaking, swaying stairs and was for the first time startlingly aware of the absence of his heartbeat. He sensed quite sharply the _lack_ in the ribbed cage where once his heart thrummed. Naught there now but the bullet's rattle, like a dried pea quietly shaking in the husk.

He felt a prickled touch and looked down to see a spider scuttling over his hand as it rested on the banister. Ichabod Crane did not flinch and with a twist to his lips knew himself then to be truly and utterly dead. He could almost see the sluggish veins stretching all over his body, filled up with a thickness which once was blood; imagined his guts as dried and knotted things, his lungs as sodden meaty lumps. He who had trusted so hard in science was now no more than a faery creature himself, bound together not with sinew and bone but with witchcraft and the Devil's whim.

The room upstairs where the Lady Archer had passed the last days of her life was festooned in cobwebs and cluttered with piles of refuse. Her body, slumped on the begrimed and threadbare sheets of a four-poster bed, seemed no more than a pile of bones or an old rag-doll - except for the eyes, still blue as sky and staring. Ichabod Crane brushed the paper-thin eyelids closed with fingers that refused to tremble.

Rolled into a corner of the room, wedged between a rat's nest and a mildewed Bible, he found the Horseman's whitened skull. Holding it carefully in one hand, the other clutching at a rusted oil lamp, Ichabod Crane descended the stairs and made his way outside into the starry night where he was not at all surprised to find the Hessian already waiting.

The restoration of the Hessian's head was a horrible sight, and the Horseman restored a frightening one with his gimlet gaze and teeth filed down to points, but Ichabod did not turn away. He bowed his head, merely, and was saluted by the Horseman in return.

The Horseman watched with grim approval as Ichabod set the manor alight. The fire would burn through the night and reduce the Van Tassel house to standing stones and ashes. Afterwards there would be nothing left of the Lady Archer to resurrect, not in this world, not even a bone.

Ichabod Crane believed that this would make an end of it. He did not expect to see the Horseman again; and nor did he believe that his or the Horseman's unlife would extend much beyond the Lady's death - like mechanical dolls, surely they would wind down, surely the sorceries that powered their limbs would fade.

But the Hessian gave voice in guttural German, blue eyes shining with intent. _Come with me,_ the Hessian demanded, iron fingers gripping Ichabod's arm. _I leave tonight. We can leave this place, you and I, now we are free._

To leave the Hollow? Something close to feeling stirred inside Ichabod Crane and the Hessian's ferocious smile almost warmed him. Still, he hesitated. For he suspected that the Hollow was one of the last places where such things were still possible - that the dead might walk, that the creatures of nightmare could ride.

What would happen if they were to leave its confines and step into the harsh lights of the eighteenth century? Where could they possibly go in a world that had left them and their kind behind? But then - what was left for him here, apart from a quiet fading away in the Western Woods?

So Ichabod Crane left the Hollow that night and forever, seated behind the Horseman on a jet-black horse named Daredevil whose strides ate the ground with unnatural speed. They passed out of legend, out of knowledge, and though they lived on in tales told to frighten children nothing more was ever heard of the ghosts of Sleepy Hollow again.

  



End file.
